Shofar

Peer-reviewed publications on Questia are publications containing articles which were subject to evaluation for accuracy and substance by professional peers of the article's author(s).

Founded in 1925, Shofar is a quarterly Jewish youth newspaper published by B'nai B'rith Youth Organization in Washington, D.C. Its subject matter covers youth and Jewish interests.

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Articles from Vol. 25, No. 4, Summer

A Concise History of the Third Reich

A Concise History of the Third Reich, by Wolfgang Benz, translated by Thomas Dunlap. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 309 pp. $35.00.Wolfgang Benz directs the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technische Universistät in Berlin....

American Artists, Jewish Images, by Matthew Baigell. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2006. 272 pages. 77 black-and-white illustrations. $45.00.Matthew Baigell's American Artists, Jewish Images is an illuminating study of the work of Helène...

"Cool Jewz." The term came to me as a tesponse to watching the film The Hebrew Hammer (Jonathan Kesselman, 2003). What is going on, I asked myself, in Jewish Popular Culture? Since 1988 and Neal Gablers An Empire of Their Own, Jon Strattone Coming Out...

This paper explores the growing acceptability of the "Jewish" nose amongst women in Hollywood and in television as an indicator of Jewish acceptability. At a time when cosmetic surgery to alter appearances of media stars as well as ordinary people has...

Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security &amp; Foreign Policy, by Zeev Maoz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 714 pp. $45.00.This book was written by a "strategist," as described by the author, as against the "linear"...

Everyman, by Philip Roth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. 182 pp. $24.00 (p).Philip Roth's Everyman, his twenty- seventh book, is all about deadi, and appropriately its title on the dust jacket appears boxed in red against a background of black....

Sarah Jessica Parker is a cool Jew, or so we argue in this essay. That is, the actress and the role that made her most famous - Sex and the City's iconic Carrie Bradshaw - offer fans a particular kind of pleasure that comes from identifying with an actor...

God's Mountain: The Temple Mount in Time, Place, and Memory, by Yaron Z. Eliav. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 353 pp. $40.00.This book offers a history of the Temple Mount (har ha-bayit) in Jerusalem that is consciously at odds...

For many, it has long seemed apparent that in his two-part "gay fantasia," Angels in America, Kushner aspired to forge some vital but unspoken alliance between Judaism and gay struggle. For many, this remains one of the play's most interesting and yet...

Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth, by Elaine B. Safer. New York: State University of New York Press, 2006. 219 pp. $21.95.Writers do not always get the critics they deserve-a scholar, who is also a warm-blooded person, with the life experience...

Oppositional Culture and the "New Jew" Brand: From Plotz to Heeb to Lost Tribe

This essay considers how an amateur literary production, Plotz: The Zine for the Vaclempt, helped to construct both an oppositional and an eminently marketable form of contemporary Jewish identity. Barbara Rushkoff, née Kligman, the wit behind Plotz,...

Political Learning and Citizenship under Conflict: The Political Socialization of Israeli and Palestinian Youngsters

Political Learning and Citizenship under Conflict: The Political Socialization of Israeli and Palestinian Youngsters, by Orit Ichilov. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. 206 pp. $125.00.Dr. Ichilov introduces the reader to the theory and research...

Punk in England is usually thought of as being related to a critique of stadium rock or to the disillusionment of a generation that saw nothing in the future but drudgery. In this article I argue that punk has more profound connections. Punk in England...

Sephardic Identity: Essays on a Vanishing Jewish Culture, edited by George K. Zucker. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland &amp; Company, 2005. 230 pp. $39.95.This anthology is edited by George Zucker, who is a professor emeritus of Spanish language...

Sliding to the Right: The Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy

Sliding to the Right: The Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy, by Samuel C. Heilman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 363 pp. $24.95.In the contemporary battle for the hearts and minds of American Orthodox Jews, the sectarian...

Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism and the Problem of English

Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism and the Problem of English, by Alan Rosen. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 241 pp. $45.00.Alan Rosen, who has read widely in recent scholarship on the Holocaust, engages the ideas...

Strangers in The Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America, by Eric Sundquist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 662 pp. $35.00.Attention to relations between Jews and Blacks has produced an extensive body of academic and popular literature,...

Telling the Little Secrets: American Jewish Writings since the 1980s, by Janet Burstein. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. 264 pp. $45.00.By now Irving Howe's dire prediction of the death of Jewish literature has undergone its own death....

"That Was Nifty": Willow Rosenberg Saves the World in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The extent to which ethnicity permeates an understanding of identity in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is apparent from the ways in which species difference stands in for racial or ethnic difference. However, among its many points of contact with ethnicity,...

The Fockerized Jew?: Questioning Jewishness as Cool in American Popular Entertainment

This essay examines the recent upsurge in overt Jewish identity in American popular culture, using the film Meet the Parents (2000) and its sequel Meet the Fockers (2004) as a case study to demonstrate how the Jewish Jew is no longer avoided and when...

The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, by Rochelle G. Saidel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. 279 pp. $21.90.As the number of Holocaust survivors who are able to tell their histories decreases, the urgency increases to leave...

The Losing Battle with Islam, by David Selbourne. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2005. 488 pp. $28.00.Listed as an historian of ideas at Ruskin College, Oxford University and a free-lance journalist, Selbourne has written this dense, rambling book...

The Myth of the Jewish Race: A Biologist's Point of View, by Alain F. Coreos. Bethlehem: Lehigh Univetsity Press, 2005. 170 pp. $39.50.With the best of intentions Alain Coreos, a biologist, seeks to bury - for all time - the ludicrous myth that Jews...

The Palestinian National Movement: Politics of Contention, 1967-2005, by Amal Jamal. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. 229 pp. $22.95.The first thing to say about this book, as will be obvious to any potential reader, is that...

Examining the specific reaction and context of meaning for Shawn Greens yearly internal battle between religious/personal commitments and job/team, and the historic context of Hank Greenberg's similar battles, this paper reflects on the complex and sometimes...

Yiddish Civilization: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation, by Paul Kriwaczek. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. 384 pp. $27.50.Reading about the history of the Yiddish civilization has never been so engaging, uplifting, and pleasurable. Paul Kriwaczek's...